How To Overcome Fear and Trust Yourself | Record-Breaking Highliner, Faith Dickey

Faith Dickey (0:01)

I think it's easy to try to kind of beat these voices down and think we need to be absolutely fearless to achieve anything or do anything that's hard. You don't need to be fearless at all.

You just need to not let fear be the one steering your ship.

Michael Gervais (0:24)

Welcome back, or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by training and training a high-performance psychologist. I am thrilled to bring you this week's conversation with Faith Dickey. And I think the best way to introduce her is to get you to imagine her world. So imagine standing on the edge of a cliff, facing an inch-wide line of webbing that stretches across a vast expanse. Now, it's tensioned between two secure anchor points, but it's dynamic in its surface. And that surface will bounce, it will sway, it will stretch. When you step on it, it's got that tension on it. This is a line that isn't just a piece of equipment, it's a gateway. It's a gateway to mastering fear, to discovering your potential.

This is the world of highlining, and Faith Dickey is a pioneer and a legend in this incredible sport.

Now, Faith isn't just a highliner, of course. Nobody can be defined by what they do. She's a symbol of resilience and mental fortitude. Since 2008, she's been redefining what's possible in a sport that demands extreme focus and demands courage. She's one of the few women to excel in highlining and has set multiple world records and achieved a series of groundbreaking firsts. For example, she was the first woman to free solo a highline.

Yep, I said that correctly. Free solo a highline. So let's just pause a minute here and think about what it means to free solo in this way. She's walking on a webbing, an inch wide, 3, feet off the ground, and she's doing it without a leash or a safety harness.

How about it? In our conversation, Faith takes us deep into the mental landscape of highlining. She shares how she navigates the delicate balance between fear and intuition, and how her experiences high above the ground have shaped her approach to life's challenges. Her strategies for managing fear, from breathwork to self-talk, are lessons in resilience and self-awareness. And I think you're going to be intrigued by how you can apply these highlining takeaways in your own life. So whether you're directly facing your own metaphorical highline or a free solo in your life, or simply curious about what it takes to manage fear just a bit more effectively, Faith's experiences offer valuable lessons in courage and commitment and the power of the human spirit. So with that, let's jump right into this extraordinary conversation with Faith Dickey.

Faith, I am so excited to sit down with you, but let's start a kind of home base. How are you?

Faith Dickey (3:22)

I'm doing pretty good. I'm pretty tired. I'm currently renovating a house that we just purchased. So I've been doing that for the last seven days straight, but I'm great. I'm excited and yeah, happy to be here.

Michael Gervais (3:34)

Awesome. So I just want to start by having you paint the picture of highlining for our community.

So we want to just help set the scene for people listening. Maybe give us a quick explanation of what highlining is and then maybe transition and bringing them into the way it feels for you to be up there and then maybe even getting into your record setting free solo. And so can we just start highline what it's like for you and then move into free solo?

Faith Dickey (4:08)

Definitely. Highlining is a balanced sport. It looks very similar to tightrope walking for those who don't know what it is.

The difference is that a tightrope is a steel cable that's completely taut and a tightrope walker uses a pole, whereas a highliner is actually walking on a flat woven rope that's stretchy and sways and bends and it's not quite as taut as a tightrope and we don't use a pole to balance. We just use our arms and our body to maintain equilibrium. And highlining really originated in Yosemite Valley, California in the 70s and early 80s. Climbers on rest days took some of their climbing webbing and stretched it between two trees and started balancing on it and they decided it was super cool and they're like, what if we do it super high off the ground? And that was kind of the birth of the sport.

I started highlining and slacklining in 2008 I just started in a park between trees. It was totally a hobby for me at the very get-go.